New Product or New Product Line?

Mary Albrecht looked again at the sales report, hoping something had changed, but the figures still showed flat sales. As brand manager for the Moricci line of Italian-style side dish products for Del Sol, a large food manufacturing company, she was responsible for growing sales 12 percent this year. But as the first quarter came to a close, sales had grown a paltry 1.2 percent. Something was going to have to change.

The Moricci product line began when Alberto Moricci took his grandmother's recipes to a dehydration plant and created a line of dehydrated sauces in 1933. Original products included spaghetti sauce, alfredo, vodka sauce, marinara, and marsala. He packaged the products in foil pouches and began selling them fromhis apartment in New York City. In 1957, he sold the company to Standard Foods, which was later acquired by Del Sol. Along the way, dried pasta was added so that the product was a complete side dishsimply empty the packet into boiling water and a few minutes later, you had a nice pasta dish.

"I don't really know what to do," Mary said to her husband, Gil, that night. "I've tried advertising on ESPN during basketball games, we did a promotion with Ibotta, and we even hired GHL, a company that does free samples in Costco and Sam's. None of these added to our sales."

Gil stirred the Moricci Noodles Alfredo into the boiling water, then dumped in a plate of diced chicken he had cut from a rotisserie chicken he had picked up at the grocery store on his way home from work. "You've got a good product," he said. "I like the way it tastes. Maybe it is the size of the packagemaybe you need to compete against boxes of mac and cheese and go after families instead of these foil pouches."

"You may have something there. You get the same amount of food, but there is the perception that the box isbiggerso you get more," she said. She watched him spoon out the chicken alfredo onto two dishes. "What if we boxed it, and added a can of chicken chunks? Made it the main dish? After all, Del Sol owns Puritan; we make a line of canned chicken."

"You could do chicken or you could do shrimp," he said. "Although chicken is better with your marsala, and you probably want beef with your spaghetti."

"True. I don't know; it might be easier to just bundle the products in a promotion. You know, offer a coupon if you buy them together and then do special display that has the products next to each other."

Questions

1. What factors would go into the decision to co-promote the products with a special display versus creating a new product?
2. If you created a new product by putting a small can of chicken into a box with the pasta, should the box carry the Moricci name? Or should it be a new product line altogether? Should the can still be labeled as Puritan?